family,2 with whose name he christened three of his sons. He was perhaps best known as a writer of songs. “Sally in our Alley” is a classic, and he has even a tenuous claim to the authorship of the English national anthem. Carey’s Dramatic Works appeared in 1743, the year in which he met his death, almost certainly by his own hand. Several of the plays were successful and particular reference should be made to the burlesques Chrononhotonthologos (1734) and The Dragon of Wantley (1737). The latter even outran the performances of The Beggar’s Opera in its first year. Not only do these plays show Carey’s satiric bent, but so also do a considerable number of his poems. In 1713, 1720, and 1729 Carey published three different collections of his poetry, each entitled Poems on Several Occasions. Although a few of the poems were repeated, almost always revised, each edition is very much a different collection. An edition was brought out in this century by Dr. Wood.3

I am strongly inclined to support Carey’s claim to the authorship of Dumpling and its Key despite Dr. E. L. Oldfield’s more recent attempt to invalidate it.4 There were at least ten editions of Dumpling in the eighteenth century. The first seven (1726-27) appeared during Carey’s life, and these (I have seen all but the third) contain the Namby Pamby verses which later appeared under Carey’s own name in his enlarged Poems on Several Occasions (1729). There was also a “sixth edition” of Dumpling (really the eighth extant edition) in Carey’s own name published “for T. Read, in Dogwell-Court, White-Friars, Fleet-Street, MDCCXLIV.” Though Namby Pamby was not added to the first edition of the Key, it appears in the second edition. Both editions were published by Mrs. Dodd, of whom Dr. Oldfield says: she “seems to have been a neighbour, and known to Carey” (p. 375). Dr. Wood indicates that “at the foot of a folio sheet containing Carey’s song Mocking is Catching, published in 1726, the sixth edition of A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling is advertised as having been lately published” (p. 442). Dr. Wood adds in a footnote that this song “appeared in The Musical Century (1740) under the title A Sorrowful Lamentation for the Loss of a Man and No Man.” Even more striking would seem to be the fact that although there are ninety-one entries in his Poems (1729), Carey has placed the Sorrowful Lamentation directly adjacent to Namby Pamby.

Dr. Wood maintains of Dumpling that “the general style bears a close resemblance to that of the prefaces to Carey’s plays and collections of poetry” (p. 443). I should like strongly to support his statement. Dr. Oldfield says that an inviolable regard for decency “is nowhere contradicted in Carey’s works . . . . Yet the pamphlets, besides being palpably Whiggish, are larded passim with vulgarity of the ‘Close-Stool’ and ‘Clyster’ variety” (p. 376). The reader need look no further than Namby Pamby to see that Carey satisfies Northrop Frye’s very proper observation: “Genius seems to have led practically every great satirist to become what the world calls obscene.”

As for the pamphlets being “palpably Whiggish,” the reader will not look far into the allegory before he realizes that one of the central attacks is against those well-known Whigs Walpole and Marlborough and their appetite for Dumpling (i.e.,

bribery and perquisites). Furthermore, the attack on Swift, which is central to the Key, is based on the very real fear that the Dean’s two recent private interviews with Walpole might presage a return to that leader’s Whig party in exchange for Dumpling. The last pages of the Key (pp. 28-30) deal with the possibility of an accommodation between Swift and Walpole which is, I feel sure, the main target of attack. In his poems (Poems, ed. Wood, pp. 83, 86, 88, and passim) Carey claims to stand between Whig and Tory, just as he does in the pamphlets (Dumpling, p. 1, and Key, p. 15 and passim).

Dr. Wood perceptively points to two parallels between Dumpling and the satiric Of Stage Tyrants (1735) which Carey openly addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield. Dumpling’s “O Braund, my Patron! my Pleasure! my Pride” (p. [ii]) becomes: “O Chesterfield, my patron and my pride” (Poems, ed. Wood, p. 104). The passage which follows, dealing with “all the Monkey-Tricks of Rival Harlequins” (Dumpling, p. [ii]), becomes:

Even more striking is a passage in the Key: “Mr. B[ooth] had spoken to Mr. W[ilks] to speak to Mr. C[ibber] . . .” (p. 111). This is similar to the following lines in Stage Tyrants:

What is particularly impressive is that Carey not only refers to the three managers of Drury Lane but mentions them in the same order and as bearing the same relationship to himself. Several highly topical theatrical allusions in the pamphlets, by which the works can be dated, accord closely to the life, views, and writings of Carey. All three managers of Drury Lane were subscribers to Carey’s Poems on Several Occasions (1729), which

was dedicated to the Countess of Burlington, who (like the Earl of Chesterfield) was closely related to Carey’s putative family. In the Poems these people and many others (including Pope) would have seen Namby Pamby under Carey’s name and drawn the obvious conclusion that Namby Pamby, Dumpling and the Key were by the same author.

We have already seen how closely Dumpling and Stage Tyrants can be tied together; the reader can compare for himself that part of Namby Pamby containing “So the Nurses get by Heart / Namby Pamby’s Little Rhymes,” with the passage from the Key: “It was here the D[ean] . . . got together all his Namby Pamby . . . from the old Nurses thereabouts” (Key, pp. 16-17).

There exists in the Bodleian an early copy of Namby Pamby (1725?) “By Capt. Gordon, Author of the Apology for Parson Alberony and the Humorist.” The joke here is surely in not only letting the Whig Gordon attack the Whig Ambrose Phillips but then, also by association, connecting Gordon’s name with the attack on Walpole and Marlborough. There is a parallel to this: Carey’s “Lilliputian Ode on Their Majesties Succession” appeared in Poems (1729), separated from the pieces previously mentioned by only one short patriotic stanza. Yet in the Huntington Library there is an almost identical version (1727) which was ostensibly published by Swift.

The first six editions of Dumpling appeared in 1726 and both editions of the Key are dated 1727. Apart from the